Tencent buys 15.75% stake in Helldivers 2 dev Arrowhead

Swedish business paper Dagens Industri revealed that Tencent quietly scooped up a 15.75 % stake in Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios back in July 2024, paying about $83 million and valuing the Stockholm studio at roughly SEK 5.1 billion (~$532 million). Arrowhead rode Helldivers 2’s success—12 million copies sold in three months, fastest-selling PlayStation Studios title—to chalk up SEK 959 million (~$100 million) in profit (SEK 729 million operating profit) last year.

Arrowhead’s co-founder Johan Pilestedt calls the Chinese player base “the holy grail,” and sees Tencent’s backing as massive economic leverage. Details on how deeply Tencent will be involved remain sketchy—Arrowhead insists its next game will be 100 % self-funded and not a PlayStation publishing deal—but the studio’s already got a passionate Chinese community (even China’s U.S. embassy tweeted about their in-game heroics).